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School libraries in safe hands

Last week was magical – because I had the chance to meet some of the great people that continue to want to be teacher librarians, and who make the commitment to take up studying as an option in quality professional development in order to do the job well!

It doesn’t matter what anyone says – I KNOW that a good school library can only be run by a qualified teacher librarian. A good teacher and ICT leader can do a lot – but they are not versed in the discipline of library and information studies and there is just so much that they can’t know. No fault of their own – they just haven’t ‘learned the trade’.

Don’t believe me?

Then ask the 60 wonderful people who attended the training days that I ran with my colleagues for the Department of Education and Community Services in NSW. Every one of them is a quality teacher. But every one of them left the two days of workshop activities stunned by what they were now going to be learning as they study to become quality teacher librarians.

Here in NSW we are fortunate that a school library is an essential, and a qualified teacher librarian is also a required position in each school!

In this year’s cohort at the DECNSW we had teachers of all ages and experiences. We also had a few geeks, who will be able to help the group get up to speed with Web 2.0 environments and online tools.

In the last few weeks we have also been traveling to different capital cities, meeting our new students entering the Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship) program at Charles Sturt University. Our degree is delivered fully online, and can be studied at a pace to suit individual needs. While many of our students are located in Australia, many more are located in city and country areas around the world.

March will see the commencement of Session One for all these new students.

3 thoughts on “School libraries in safe hands”

Thanks Judy. It was great to meet our tutors and know that there is support available for us as we stumble and drag ourselves through the huge amount of information and learning to come. We will certainly be going in with our eyes wide open. How exciting🙂
Kath Lollbackhttp://kathslearningjourney.wordpress.com/